Justin.tv’s social video bet pays off with 150K downloads

Justin.tv, one of the best-known startups offering live-streaming video services, launched a mobile video application called Socialcam two weeks ago that moved the company in a new direction. The app seems to be attracting users — it has been downloaded more than 150,000 times.

When I talked to Justin.tv spokesman Matthew DiPietro right before the Socialcam launch, he told me the company was applying some of the lessons it had learned from adding livestreaming to the Justin.tv mobile app to the new service. One lesson was that users care a lot more about video quality and the app’s social components than they do about whether or not the video is live, he said. So the goal of Socialcam is to make it super-easy to upload videos from your phone, then share them on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.

Apparently, Socialcam was downloaded more than 50,000 times in its first few days alone. Although it’s available on both iPhone and Android, the vast majority of early users are on iPhones, as you can see in the chart below. (Socialcam has been compared to photo-sharing application Instagram, which reportedly hit 2 million registered users in four months despite only being available on the iPhone.)

By comparison, the existing Justin.tv app has been downloaded more than 4 million times. When I asked DiPietro today whether Socialcam might eventually eclipse the company’s old app, he said:

With Socialcam, we believe strongly that we’ve created something that people will use, and that we’ve solved a problem that was keeping people from sharing video as a part of their everyday mobile and social media habits. The potential is gigantic. The numbers so far are very encouraging, but of course only time will tell.

The San Francisco startup is backed by Alsop Louie Partners, Tim Draper, and incubator Y Combinator.

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